Man, nobody wants to hear this news. It’s like hearing your grandpa just had a stroke. American actor Morgan Freeman was airlifted to a hospital in Memphis after the car he was travelling in drove off the road and flipped over several times.

From Reuters:

TUPELO, Mississippi (Reuters) - Oscar-winning U.S. actor Morgan Freeman was hospitalized in serious condition on Monday after the car he was driving careened off a rural highway and rolled several times, authorities said.

Freeman, 71, was airlifted late on Sunday night to a Memphis, Tennessee, hospital, about 100 miles from the accident scene, which is near a home he keeps in Charleston, Mississippi.

“The vehicle went off the edge of the road and flipped several times,” Mississippi Highway Patrol Sgt. Ben Williams said. No other car was involved in the accident.

From the direction Freeman was traveling, he appeared to be headed toward his home, Williams said.

Williams said it was “possible” that Freeman, who co-stars in the current blockbuster Batman movie the “Dark Knight,” had fallen asleep at the wheel, but he added that authorities had ruled out alcohol as a factor in the wreck.

Freeman was conscious and talking to arriving officers afterward, Williams said, adding that no citation had been issued in the accident.

A spokeswoman at Regional Medical Center in Memphis said Freeman was in serious condition but gave no further details.

Both Freeman and a female passenger, identified as Demaris Meyer, were wearing seat belts, but the air bags did not deploy in the 1997 Nissan Maxima registered to Meyer, Williams said. He said he did not know the extent of her injuries.

Reuters/Nielsen

That sound you just heard was Samuel L. Jackson’s workload doubling.

In a move Blockbuster chief executive James Keyes called a “game-changing retail concept” that would “dramatically accelerate” the ailing movie rental chain’s morphing into a 21st Century multi-platform media dispensary, Blockbuster Inc. made a $1.35 billion cash offer in a hostile takeover bid for electonics retailer Circuit City yesterday, a move that was panned by both analysts and Circuit City:

Wall Street analysts puzzled over the rationale of combining two troubled companies with little in common. Circuit City, meanwhile, put out a press release questioning whether Blockbuster could obtain sufficient financing for the deal. The offer, at between US$6 and US$8 a share, is bigger than Blockbuster’s entire stock-market value, which totalled about US$630-million based on Friday’s closing price.

“It makes zero sense,” said Howard Davidowitz, chairman of Davidowitz &Associates Inc., a retail consulting and investment-banking firm in New York. “Circuit City is completely underwater and I don’t see any major synergies from the deal … A deal has to be ‘one-plus-one equals three.’ This is ‘one-plus-one equals one-and-a-half.’ “

It seems the only real winner in this deal might be Blockbuster’s chief antagonist, Netflix:

Blockbuster Inc. succeeds with its hostile takeover bid for Circuit City Stores Inc., it could potentially result in the movie rental company selling its DVD-by-mail business to its online rival, Netflix Inc., an analyst said Tuesday. Jefferies & Co. Inc. analyst Youssef Squali said in a Tuesday client note that the success of Blockbuster’s bid of just over $1 billion for the struggling electronics retailer is “far from certain” but could benefit Netflix in a variety of ways. These include “making Blockbuster less competitive online, and potentially ‘forcing’ Blockbuster to sell its DVD-by-mail business to … Netflix, in an effort to monetize this under-appreciated asset,” he said.